periphery.
Narcissistic, technical ranting and information.

Upgrading Kindle 1 Firmware

With all the hullabaloo (is there even a right way to spell that?) around the Kindle 2 being launched today, I got curious as to whether my Kindle 1 would be receiving the same benefits as the new version. Looks like it should, actually, although I upgraded and don’t notice much surface difference (except that it screwed up the ordering of books).

Edit: This firmware upgrade definitely does not give the Kindle1 the same feature set as the Kindle2, but it does add a few things. For more details, see Amazon’s page.

Since I read a decent number of programming books, the new features that is most noteworthy is that your Kindle 1 will now support monospaced fonts, which makes reading code far easier.

I couldn’t very easily find instructions on how to update the Kindle 1’s firmware, but found a link to Amazon buried somewhere down in a MobileRead forums post. The easiest way to update the firmware is basically to put your Kindle into sleep (or screensaver, whatever) state, and make sure wireless is on. I did this, and when I woke up this morning, I was at version 1.20 (the freshest version).

If you don’t have good WhisperNet service, or you prefer to update manually, Amazon’s info is here, but I’ll paste the good stuff:

To manually install the Kindle software update:

  1. Visit Amazon.com and make sure you’re logged into the Amazon.com account to which your Kindle is registered. The download will not be available if you are not logged in before attempting step 2.
  2. Visit www.amazon.com/update_kindle.bin to download the Kindle software update file.
  3. Set your Kindle power switch to the “ON” position.
  4. Connect Kindle to your computer using the included USB cable.
  5. Use your computer’s file browser to copy the file “Update_kindle_1.2.bin” from your computer to Kindle’s root directory or the SD card. Do not place the file into one of Kindle’s folders.
  6. Check the USB activity indicator on the Kindle cursor bar. When the silver cursor stops flashing, the file transfer is complete and you can safely disconnect Kindle from your computer.
  7. Use your computer to unmount or eject your Kindle and disconnect the USB cable from Kindle and your computer.
  8. Press the Home key and then select “Settings” from the Home menu.
  9. From Settings screen, select “Update Your Kindle”. Please note that this menu option will be grayed out if the most recent update has already been installed.
  10. Select “Ok” when prompted if you want to perform an update.

24th February, 2009

Mimo UM-710 on Windows 7

A while ago I read the engadget article on this cool little 800×480 7″ LCD from Nanovision. I pre-ordered one from The Gadgeteers, who are some fellow nerds who are importing these bad boys from Korea.

When I got mine, I immediately went to get the drivers for Vista, assuming they would work in Windows 7. Bad news, I got my first BSOD in win7–ouch! So for those reading this: DO NOT INSTALL THE NANOVISION PACKAGES ON WINDOWS 7!

Instead, I had to do some digging as to who the real manufacturer of this product was. Turns out the USB display adapter included in it is a standard DisplayLink device. Coincidentally, DisplayLink are one of the first OEMs to have been writing win7 drivers for their goods. Luckily this story has a mostly happy ending.

The beta drivers from January didn’t work, but luckliy the ones from February are indeed working. The win7 drivers are definitely beta, and there are some caveats. For one, they only seem to enable the Mimo in horizontal mode. When it’s in vertical mode, it basically looks like horizontal with the sides cut off.

Anyway, now that I’ve spit out the actual info, here are some pictures.

nanovision_box1

nanovision_box2

I love this opening phrase. Awesome.

nanovision_screen1

This is the Mimo next to my 15″ Thinkpad T61p. Sorry for the dark light, but it definitely gives a nice comparison for the size. In terms of the screen’s quality, it’s very bright and nice. There is a pretty noticeable backlight bleed when the screen is just displaying black, but when you’re watching video or actually using apps in it, things look just fine.

nanovision_screen2

And finally a close-up of just the Mimo. You will notice I ripped off the huge/heavy/cheesy base. I’ve added a Gorillapod GoGo as the mount, which is way lighter, and much more flexible. I’ll be writing a post on that (moderately simple) hardware hack (just requiring some quick Dremel use) in the near future. I would like to point out that while the weight of the thing is tagged as 1.4 pounds or so, at least half of the weight is the stock base. In addition, the base doesn’t fold down very compactly. However, using the GorillaPod is really quite awesome.

Anyway, for $130, this is definitely a nice little travel companion for my laptop. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone with a few bucks to blow on a new toy.

16th February, 2009

Windows 7 on a Thinkpad T43p

I’ve been running the win7 beta (MSDN subscriber, build 7000) on my T61p (my primary box) for a few weeks now. I am absolutely loving it. I haven’t had any crashes or anything of that nature, and all my apps work.

(The only exception is that the mute button doesn’t make the systray volume go into mute state, but it does actually mute. This sends some apps, like the last.fm player, into a weird state, but at least I figured out what the problem was.)

I also installed win7 on my older T43p, which is a 2ghz system with 1.5Gb of RAM and some ATI x300 graphics card. It runs really well, and most of the drivers work out of box. In fact I just got an updated Bluetooth driver from Windows Update last night. There were, however, a few I had to figure out for myself, most importantly the wireless. Others have written about other T4x series machines and drivers, but I haven’t seen one for the T43. The list:

The strange thing about the list above is the Intel PRO Wireless driver. I tried for weeks to get the Vista driver to work, to no avail. Then this morning I saw a post on the thinkpads.com forums: Windows 7 on a T43. This guy had the same issue as me, and tried the XP drivers, which got it to work for him. I guess this isn’t a problem for all T43 and T43p users, but it was for me, so I figured I would mention it.

The biometric capabilities being built-in to Windows starting with 7 are also really, really cool. I love my fingerprint readers, but it always seems weird to have some 3rd party mucking around with Windows authentication. Now that it’s integrated it feels much more logical, and the “locked” screen ends up looking much more natural.

upek

Overall, I have to say, I really like win7, even on the older hardware. The transparent glass stuff, and animation transitions, all work really well on the T43p. Now that I finally have wireles working with it, I’ll be able to use it more, and since it’s smaller than the T61p, I’ll probably end up taking it around (not to mention that since it’s old, I’m not nearly as paranoid about damaging it) town or to the library or whatever. I would definitely say you should check out win7, just make sure you get your drivers straight before you install.

31st January, 2009

Making Zune Album Art Work

I am a huge fan of both my Zune 80 and the desktop software. Okay, the desktop software can be a bit cumbersome some of the time.

One of the ways in which I am anal-retentive about my mp3 collection is the keeping of album art. I have used a few tools for this. The main one I’ve used is called Album Art Aggregator, but it has dropped off the face of the earth after years of not being updated. That’s alright though, since someone else has written an even better version called Media Art Aggregator. I’ve also used Picard, although it crashed a good deal and choked on large music directories.

Anyway, to bring this back to my original point: I use the standard naming convention of dropping a folder.jpg into each album directory I have. This works with most mainstream music players, with the exception of Zune (iTunes doesn’t adhere to this either, Apple fan boys). My solution was to write some sort of script that would parse through my folders on \\Server\Music\ and copy folder.jpg to ZuneAlbumArt.jpg, which is the magic name Zune uses.

(Now that I’m writing this, I’m wondering why the hell I didn’t just whip up a Python script—I’m good at Python for chrissakes).

After doing some digging around and searching, I found this thread about writing a batch file to achieve this. I editted the code so it would be verbose, and this is what I came up with:

@echo off
for /f "tokens=*" %%a in ('dir \\Server\Music\folder.jpg /b /s /-c /a:-d') do (
call :PROCESS "%%a")
endlocal
goto :EOF
:PROCESS
setlocal
set dr=%~d1& set pth=%~p1& set base=%~n1& set ext=%~x1
echo STARTING COMMAND: copy "%dr%%pth%%base%%ext%" "%dr%%pth%ZuneAlbumArt.jpg"
copy "%dr%%pth%%base%%ext%" "%dr%%pth%ZuneAlbumArt.jpg"
echo DONE!

Ultimately, that did it for me. The weird thing is that for all the folders that already had ZuneAlbumArt.jpg in them, I was denied copy access. This is weird because I ran the batch script from an elevated prompt, on the server itself. I don’t really care about this, because if ZuneAlbumArt.jpg already existed, it’s because Zune was able to (for once) actually find the album art in its own hidden way. So whatever.

Anyway, hopefully this will be useful to fellow Zune, and even iTunes, users out there. Let me know if you have any problems.

22nd October, 2008

Graphical Powershell

I’ve been trying to adopt using Powershell for all command-line needs in Windows. I have to say I like it quite a bit. There are definitely things to get used to, like the fact that everything is treated as a .NET object, but I think they’ll become benefits. I downloaded CTP2 of Powershell v2 (you can too by participating in the CTP on Microsoft Connect) a few weeks back, and have been using it since then. The nice thing is that this bad boy has window areas for script editing, a command input window, and an output window. A very cool way to include all necessary IDE-like functionality without requiring me to launch Visual Studio.

Graphical Powershell

The most fun part of using a new shell is creating the home dot file. I’ve been culling some .profile files from around the internet, and I’m linking it here in the hopes that someone may find it useful. I prefer to place the .profile in my user home directory. Sadly, Powershell doesn’t automatically recognize profiles placed there. What you have to do is dot-source your home directory profile from the real profile location. The default profile is at C:\Users\%username%\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\profile.ps1. You need to go to that file (or create it, if need be) and include this line:

. "$HOME\.profile.ps1"

At this point, Powershell will not look into C:\Users\%username% for the .profile.ps1 file.

My .profile settings for Powershell.

30th September, 2008

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welcome...

to periphery.org, a weblog maintained by zac schellhardt. This is where I post anything I learn that can't easily be found online. Every time a lightbulb goes off in my head, I try to post the solution here, to save someone else some time.

I also post code to this blog. I maintain the code in a public SVN repository, and every time I check in something new I'll write an entry here with some explanation and examples.

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